Jamie Ritchie & Rory Darge react to British & Irish Lions snub
Both Edinburgh's Ritchie and Glasgow Warriors' Rory Darge were not included in the squad for the tour of Australia as eight Scots made the cut.
Scott Cummings, Zander Fagerson and Pierre Schoeman are the Scottish representatives among a 21-strong selection of forwards for the Lions.
Huw Jones, Blair Kinghorn, Finn Russell, Sione Tuipulotu and Duhan van der Merwe feature in the 17-man backs selection.
The eight-man Scotland inclusion matches the number of Scots involved in the last tour in 2021, and is one shy of the all-time record from 1989.
Ritchie and Darge were overlooked but neither player required support after the decision with the experience to be used as motivation moving forward as both men remain satisfied with their efforts even if they were not selected.
'Personally, I feel like I'd done all I could in terms of how I performed and stuff, so I was comfortable with that," said Ricthie on the BBC Scotland Rugby Podcast.
'At the end of the day, it's down to someone's opinion and decision-making and what they feel they need in their squad. At that point, it's outside of my control. For 2021, I feel like I was further away than I was this year, but I was more upset then.
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'I'm a bit more mature now in terms of how I react to these things. Obviously, it would have been nice to have that moment, but I'm comfortable with the performances that I've put in to put myself in the mix. I said this to my wife because she was quite upset when we watched it together.
'I said to her, if you look at the position we were in a year ago after Six Nations, where it hadn't gone the way I wanted to in terms of selection and missing out on the captaincy and humming and hawing about whether or not I was going to go on the summer tour, if we'd said we'd be sitting here at the Lions announcement day, feeling like we were in with a real shout and then disappointed when it didn't happen, we would absolutely have taken it.
'That's the perspective that I'm taking on at the moment. I felt like I did all I could. The call didn't come, and that's OK.'
Ritchie discussed the thinking behind selections with Lions and Scotland coach John Dalziel but has not had any official word over making a standby list for the tour.
'I know how much I put into this game and how much I put into preparing and going out and playing and putting my body through, so why should other people get to experience that?' said Darge. 'And I'm not saying that from a negative point of view, it's purely a positive point of view.
'I was delighted for the guys that are involved and it just was a bit of a motivator for me, really, and something to aspire to.
'You have to have that initial bit where you are gutted and you're like, 'why can't I be involved in that?' But then, really quickly you're able to be like, that's something to aspire to, that's something to hopefully one day be a part of.'
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